Report: U.S. kids tripped up by geography

JOHN HECHINGER, BLOOMBERG NEWS |
July 19, 2011

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U.S. schoolchildren, noses in their smartphones, don't know the lay of the land.

Only half of fourth-graders correctly put the following in descending order of size: North America, the U.S., California and Los Angeles, according to a federal test known as the "Nation's Report Card," the Education Department said today.

Less than one-third of elementary and high school students showed proficiency in geography, the Education Department said. Students aren't learning subjects such as geography and history as teachers spend more time on math and reading to accommodate standardized tests, said Roger Downs, a Pennsylvania State University geography professor.

As "classroom time becomes an even more precious and scarce commodity, geography, with subjects such as history and the arts, is losing out in the zero-sum game that results from high-stakes testing," Downs said in a statement with the results.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has cited this narrowing of the curriculum in calling for changes before the start of the next school year to the No Child Left Behind law, which ties federal funding to standardized math and reading tests.

On the federal geography test administered last year, about a third of fourth-graders could answer a question showing they could determine distance on a map.

Because of students' dependence on technology, "the ability to read a map seems to be becoming a lost art," said Shannon Garrison, a member of the board overseeing the test.

Shown a picture of tectonic plates near Japan, a third of eighth-graders indicated they had no understanding of their relationships to earthquakes.

In the nationally representative sample of public and private schools, 7,000 fourth- graders, 9,500 eighth-graders and 10,000 12th-graders participated in last year's geography test. Officially called the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test measures knowledge in nine subjects.

Federal tests on history and civics released earlier this year had similar outcomes, showing a "pattern of disappointing results for our 12th-graders' performance across all three social science subjects," said David Driscoll, chairman of the board that administers the test.

In a bright spot, minorities improved their achievement relative in some cases, said Driscoll, a former Massachusetts education commissioner. Narrowing this "achievement gap" has been a focus of No Child Left Behind, signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002.